During synthesis of a design of an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or system-on-chip (SOC), multibit mapping or multibit cell merging of flip-flops can be performed. Example aspects of conventional multibit techniques are described, for example, in by A. Mutschler, “Another Tool In the Bag”—http://semiengineering.com/another-tool-in-the-bag/; and Y. Kretchmer, “Using Multibit register inference to save area and power” http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800107513_480100_AN_c6844605.HTM.
However, such conventional techniques are not applied to flip-flops in shift registers, which can negatively impact the amount of resources consumed in designs having large numbers of functional shift registers, among other things.